Another one to watch out for - if you say you're not very good at something, it will be taken at face value and understood as "he's useless"; whereas you were probably just being modest! Also the overuse of "sorry", when sometimes we are anything but!​Please head to alpinelinguists' facebook page here to comment.

Switching between Qwerty and Azerty keyboards is challenging enough but I've been struggling with a new variant this month: QWERTZ. I've tried numerous language settings but most of the punctuation keys just do their own thing... &ù$!)?*. It's taken until now for me to unearth the exclamation mark hiding at the top left under the F1 and 3 squiggles key, and requiring an Alt Gr, Shift and a Handstand. So with no smiley emojis to come to the rescue it's been a serious August. Until now!!!!THE LOCAL.fr ran a good article recently about the difficulty of mastering different keyboard layouts. www.thelocal.fr/20160120/what-annoys-expats-the-most-about-the-french-keyboard​

Please go ahead and share any of your keyboard-related frustrations on the facebook post here ;-)

In this corner of the Haute Savoie we like to do things a little differently hence the unusual take on the national "Course des Garçons de Café" annual event. Read on, it gets better ;) Taken from this week's entertainments schedule prominently displayed in the tourist office entrance. No wonder the tourists are looking puzzled!

For those of you not familiar with the event, waiters from local cafés and restaurants pit themselves against each other in a series of short road races across France - all dressed in formal black and white serving attire and carrying trays of wine glasses. Ok it's odd, but it doesn't normally involve any show jumping!Feel free to comment here on facebook.